The Jersey City city council members received a briefing tonight on an extensive program being implemented by Mayor Steve Fulop to collect and aggregate data on the workings of city departments and city infrastructure to improve services and increase accessibility.

Councilwoman Candice Osborne said the Dashboard Program was a “massive undertaking” and said she was “impressed.”

The program’s primary objectives are to increase efficiency, reduce spending, increase revenue, improve services and increase transparency,” said Fulop aide Brian Platt during his presentation at the caucus meeting.

The program’s five steps are to establish contact with department heads and personnel, create the dashboard tool in an Excel file, gather data, analyze the data and revise strategies to make improvements, Platt told the council. It is currently in the data collection phase.

“We want to have a single site, website ideally, where the public, city council, anyone can go and just learn about the activity of each department of the city -- learn, understand, analyze,” Platt said.

As an example, Platt said, when the firefighters pulled up at a fire they would immediately be able to know if the structure is supposed to be vacant, if there are any health or building code violations, where the nearest fire hydrant is and if it's working.

City officials, for instance, would be able to use the system to determine which sewer and water lines are being repaired most often in order to make more permanent repairs.

As part of the presentation, mayor’s aide Domenick Bauer noted that some of the most preliminary information collected has already revealed some clear patterns and has led to addressing an issue.

The chart he displayed showed there is a large spike in complaints of garbage in streets and in lots every Friday and he said the majority of garbage pick-ups in the city is done on Thursdays and it is done “in a messy way.”

The aides stressed that it would be an overwhelming burden for city workers to log in the large amount of information related to each of their activities and said they hope to get software that would allow the data to be entered as easily and instantaneously as possible.

“We need software capable of recording data in real time in the field without making it a huge burden on workers,” said Platt. He suggested a phone app that might automatically record a location, file a report, add a photograph to the report, make the information instantly available online and even notify a constituent that the problem had been solved, such as a pothole being fixed.

Platt and Bauer were not asking council members to take any action, but said they wanted to provide them with the information so they could begin considering the Dashboard Program.